Wiz Wizardton

#1 Friendly reminder for you mobile users to check that you're browsing on WiFi! For everyone else, maybe just check anyway, you never know. Plenty of big gifs to follow and I'd hate for anyone's phone bill to grow teeth or something.
This is one of those "look at how far it's come" posts, so if that's not your thing, feel free to read anyway!

#2 Early last year I was doing a weekend game jam for the fun of it. Yes, some people code for fun, stop laughing.

#3 The prototype was originally meant to be a simple arena shoot-em-up inspired by the incredibly fun Super Crate Box by Vlambeer, with some twists on gameplay and the AI that I thought would improve on their already great idea

#4 Instead of guns, I opted for a magic-based theme with spell-casting and elements to unlock, because I like magic in video games, simple as that

#5 The whole reason for the prototype was to see how fun it would be if enemies could semi-intelligently navigate an arena and track the player down. Prototypes are often just to see if something is feasible, and often aren't successes, so I was relieved to find that the results were addicting and challenging

#6 Other enemy types I wrote included a flying unit that would wander between waypoints until the player got within range. This flying enemy could also "phase", traveling through solid objects at a faster rate, making them a bit of a challenge when not keeping track of them

#7 A few months after the prototype I found some artists willing to help out. Things began to move very quickly at this point

#8 Bizarre characters started taking shape and the game got a personality beyond the simple squares I had prototyped with

#19 And then along came Wiz Wizardton, the "protagonist", which loosely translates to "exterminator" in this language I just made up. Excuse the poor gif quality here, upload limits kept me from uploading the nicer version... I'll try to figure something out. Maybe

#20 Throughout development a narrative started to develop around Wiz, the naked nomad who happened upon a former wizard's robe and limited edition copy of "The Book of Arcane Antics". This would be the start of the player's journey

#21 The book granted Wiz the ability to cast magic. Near-unlimited power was within his grasp! Seriously, I don't know how the artists came up with his design - it's super creepy.

#22 But this new power required Essence, and seemingly only one castle kept Essence in stock

#23 The plan is simple. Invade the castle, conquer the levels, unlock new spells, keep conquering, gain unlimited power. It's almost too easy... It's not though, it's not easy at all, it's incredibly hard to play right now and I may have to tweak the difficulty a bit soon.

#24 And that is how a weekend game jam quickly evolved into what is now known as Wiz Wizardton, my first real indie game as a professional developer. I want to be clear though, there's no alpha, beta, theta, zeta or any other type of fraternity here, and no crowd funding campaign to promote. I'm just a programmer who is incredibly proud of the amazing work my team has done, and wanted to shamelessly show it off to the community I've spent (wasted) years of my life in